Olympus Has Fallen

By AP KRYZA

Olympus Has Fallen harks back to the late-’80s, early-’90s subgenre known as the “Die Hard on an X” flick, that special brand of knockoff adrenaline rush that includes such escapism as Speed, Passenger 57 and Sudden Death, which all saw one man in the wrong place at the wrong time facing a whole army of terrorists. With Olympus, it's a literal army that storms the White House, taking the president (Aaron Eckhart) and his cabinet hostage. Luckily, his disgraced former head of security (Gerard Butler) survives the initial onslaught and proceeds to stab, shoot, blow up and maim his way to saving the boss. Director Antoine Fuqua could be called insensitive for depicting iconic American landmarks being torn to shreds by advanced weaponry as a staggering number of civilians are felled on camera. But Olympus Has Fallen doesn't seem to exist in a post-9/11 world. It's firmly grounded in the early ’90s, when all we wanted to do was watch sinewy men spit one-liners at menaces from foreign lands before going on killing sprees. In that sense, it delivers the goods, but it never rises above the level of a big-budget B-movie. It's Passenger 57 in the White House. Luckily, Passenger 57 is pretty entertaining for a horrible film.